"What d'ye say?" cried the skipper, springing from his chair. "Run her
out, ye say?"

He trembled with fury, burned the air with oaths, and called down all
the curses known to tradition upon the heads of the men of Chance Along.
He snatched up a stout billet of birch, green and heavy, wrenched open
the door, and sprang into the outer gloom.

Nick Leary's story was true. The mutineers had consumed the brandy, come
to hot words over the sharing of the gold, dropped their dead and
wounded, and commenced to curse, kick and hit at one another with clubs.
Then Dick Lynch had put his knife into a young man named Pat Brennen, a
nephew of the loyal Bill. Panic had brought the fight to a drunken,
slobbering finish.

"There bes four strong lads kilt in one day!" some one had cried. "The
black curse bes on us! The divil bes in it!"

Full of liquor, fear and general madness, they had come to the opinion
that the strange young female whom the skipper had saved from the
fore-top and carried to his house was such an imp of darkness as had
never before blighted the life and luck of Chance Along. She had
bewitched the skipper. Her evil eyes had cast a curse on the wreck and
that curse had been the death of their three comrades. She had put a
curse on the gold, so that they had all gone mad the moment they felt
the touch of it in their hands. The skipper, under her spell, had
betrayed them--had given them gold so that they should fight over it and
destroy one another. It was all very simple--too simple to require
reasoning! In truth, the curse was upon them--the curse of dead men's
liquor, dead men's gold--the curse of greed, blood-lust and fear! So